The camouflage-suited men in the Miami motel room had a bold plan: slip into Nicaragua, steal a Soviet helicopter gunship and fly it out to collect an advertised bounty of $1 million. One of the leaders, the man armed with the German PPK .38 automatic handgun who called himself "Col. Flaco," advocated a second objective.

A 6-year-old motion filed in a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department corruption case is adding fuel to a burgeoning public discussion over the alleged participation of U.S. government agents in drug trafficking and weapons shipments. The motion, filed in 1990 by Century City defense lawyer Harland W. Braun, alleges that sheriff's deputies serving a search warrant in 1986 turned up evidence linking CIA operatives to military activities in Central America and drug sales in Los Angeles.

American rancher James Jordan Denby, jailed since being shot down while flying his light plane over Nicaragua on Dec. 6, was released Saturday into the custody of Democratic U.S. Senate contender Bill Press of California. Denby, 58, who had been accused of working with the Contras, then flew with Press to Los Angeles in a chartered luxury jet.

Former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush deceived the public about their knowledge of the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal, according to memoirs being published Monday by one of the central figures in the event, former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane. McFarlane says he briefed President Reagan and then-Vice President Bush from the start of the deal in 1985, 17 months earlier than Bush admits he knew about it.

President Bush granted Christmas Eve pardons to former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and five other former government officials Thursday, wiping out all pending criminal prosecutions in the Iran-Contra case. In an angry statement, the Iran-Contra independent counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh, accused Bush of "misconduct" and declared that the pardon was part of the cover-up that "has continued for more than six years."

Penthouse magazine says it will pay former White House secretary Fawn Hall $500,000 to pose nude. Playboy magazine wants her for a "celebrity pictorial." Her friends say she is also receiving television, film and modeling offers. So far, they say, she is not interested. "She thought the (Penthouse) offer was disgusting," said F. Andrew Messing Jr., a conservative activist and friend of Hall's. Hall, former secretary to fired National Security Council aide Lt. Col. Oliver L.

A former CIA station chief in Costa Rica was indicted Monday on charges of conspiracy to provide illegal aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, a sign that independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh has extended his investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal to focus on the actions of several CIA officials. Joseph F. Fernandez, 51, was charged with helping then-White House aide Oliver L. North deliver guns to the Contras in 1986, during a period when Congress had banned U.S. military aid to the rebels.

A federal judge on Monday ordered former President Ronald Reagan to give videotaped testimony as a defense witness in the Iran-Contra trial of former White House National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter. U.S. District Judge Harold H. Greene brushed aside Reagan's claim that the dignity of the presidency would be damaged by requiring a former President to give evidence against his will. "It would not be fair . . .

December 31, 1987 | WILLIAM C. REMPEL and MICHAEL WINES, Times Staff Writers

It began as a shipload of weapons for the Nicaraguan Contras, secretly bought in a dark corner of the international arms bazaar from a notorious Mideast terrorist by private agents of White House aide Oliver L. North.

A federal judge on Monday dropped all criminal charges against Oliver L. North, the central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, ending a saga that the former White House aide characterized as "five years of fire." U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell dismissed the case at the request of independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, who said that testimony provided last week by North's former boss, Robert C. McFarlane, made it unlikely that North's previous convictions could be reinstated.

Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz considered George Bush a "superficial" politician who was "up to his ears" in the Iran-Contra scandal, according to Lawrence E. Walsh, the independent counsel who investigated the affair. But Walsh's final report also said that Shultz himself knew more about then-President Ronald Reagan's secret arms sales to Iran than he later admitted to Congress.

In a scathing counterattack, former President Ronald Reagan and key officials of his Administration denounced the final report of the Iran-Contra independent counsel Tuesday as "fantasy . . . fiction . . . prosecutorial abuse" and the product of a Soviet-style inquisition. Former President George Bush, vice president at the time of the Iran-Contra controversy, accused independent counsel Lawrence E.

While some details of the Iran-Contra scandal may be in dispute, independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh's findings in no way alter the tale of a secret foreign policy gone wrong. Indeed, as it has unfolded over the past seven years, the plot has proved too thick for any fiction writer to concoct: First, President Ronald Reagan made a decision to sell arms to Iran in opposition to his own policy to remain neutral in the Iran-Iraq war.

Former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush engaged in conduct that contributed to "a concerted effort to deceive Congress and the public" about the Iran-Contra scandal, according to the final report issued Tuesday by the independent counsel who investigated the affair. In his findings, Lawrence E.

Special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh's final report on the Iran-Contra scandal concludes that President Ronald Reagan was not out of the loop nor an innocent victim of overzealous aides, according to U.S. News & World Report. The report alleges that Reagan personally directed national security aides Robert C. McFarlane and John M. Poindexter at critical periods during the secret and illegal shipments of U.S. missiles to Iran in 1985 and 1986, according to sources who saw a final draft.

Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh, firing back at Republican critics who have charged that he has tried to "criminalize" policy disputes between the President and Congress, argued Tuesday for restoring the law under which he was appointed. Prosecuting officials who lie to congressional committees is not "criminalizing" policy disputes, as critics have charged, because lying to Congress is a crime, Walsh said. Speaking in Boston to the American Bar Assn.

Nicaraguan rebels, shaken by U.S. aid reductions and dissidents demanding changes within the Contra movement, are seeking to reorganize the Nicaraguan Resistance. Leaders of the Contras from Miami, Venezuela, Costa Rica and other points will meet in the Concorde Hotel today and Monday to resolve issues that threaten to split the rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government.

The three months of hearings by the congressional Iran- contra investigating committees produced not only some extraordinary information but also some memorable lines. Here are some of the best: Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord, who organized the private airlift to supply arms to Nicaragua's contras and participated in the arms sales to Iran. Testified May 5-8.

Accusing former President George Bush of "an absolute disdain for the rule of law," independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh said Monday that Bush's pardon of former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger blocked public airing of "new and disturbing facts" about the Iran-Contra scandal. Walsh, in an interim report to Congress prompted by Bush's Christmas Eve pardon, said that former Secretary of State George P.

Former President George Bush misrepresented his role in the arms-for-hostage deals with Iran while he was vice president, former Secretary of State George P. Shultz says in memoir excerpts published Sunday. In the excerpts, which appear in Time magazine, Shultz says he was "astonished" to read a 1987 interview in the Washington Post in which Bush said no one strongly opposed the arms deals during 1985 and 1986 White House meetings. Shultz remembers those meetings differently.